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Skate, Dressed, to Re-Cook
Pick the flesh from the bones, mince finely, and mix with it its bulk in finely-grated bread-crumbs. Add a seasoning of salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg; moisten the preparation with butter, and mix in a little chopped parsley. Beat it till smooth, bind it together with yolk of egg, and form it into the shape of corks or balls. Fry these in hot fat, drain them, and serve on a neatly-folded napkin. Time to fry, ten minutes.
A Victorian rechauffé: cooked skate turned into croquettes. The only tricky parts are the frying time and the fact that skate does not keep like other fish.
- Start with sound fishSkate develops a strong ammonia smell within a day or two of being cooked, because its flesh carries urea that breaks down quickly. If the leftover fish smells of ammonia at all, discard it rather than mask it with nutmeg and parsley.
- Picking the fleshSkate wing is cartilage rather than bone, and the flesh strips off in ribbons once cooked. Run your fingers through the picked meat to catch stray slivers of cartilage, which stay unpleasantly firm after frying.
- Equal bulk of crumbs"Its bulk in finely-grated bread-crumbs" means by volume, not weight, and it is a lot of bread. For a modern, fishier croquette use about half that, roughly 1 cup of dry crumbs to 2 cups of picked flesh.
- Moisten with butterMelted butter, added a spoonful at a time until the mixture just coheres when squeezed. Around 2 oz for a pound of picked fish; too much and the balls slump in the fat.
- Ten minutes is too longEverything in the mixture is already cooked, so the frying is only to set the egg and colour the outside. At 350-375F, cork-shaped croquettes take three to four minutes. Ten minutes at that heat gives you a dark crust and a dried-out centre.
- Bind and chillOne yolk per pound of mixture is enough. Chill the shaped croquettes for 30 minutes before frying; the book skips this, but cold croquettes hold their shape far better in hot fat.
- An outer coatingThe recipe fries them bare. A pass through beaten egg and dry crumbs gives a crisper shell and much less risk of the croquettes breaking open.
- Yield and servingA pound of picked skate makes about 16 cork-sized croquettes, enough for four as a light dish. The folded napkin was there to absorb fat; kitchen paper does the same, and a wedge of lemon or a caper sauce suits the fish.
Cassell's gives skate a run of entries because it was a cheap, plentiful fish in late nineteenth-century Britain, landed in quantity and often sold well below turbot or sole. Recipes headed "to re-cook" or grouped as réchauffés fill a great deal of Victorian household cookery: the joint or fish from one day reappeared minced, bound and fried the next, since a kitchen with no refrigeration had to use up cooked food fast and a household budget could not tolerate waste. The cork shape is one of the conventional forms for a small fried croquette in books of this period, though this recipe allows balls as an alternative. Serving fried food on a folded napkin was common in books of this era, both to blot the frying fat and to signal that the dish had been properly drained.